Cinacchio Mathematica UGM 2011.

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THE NEXT GENERATIONS:

population dynamics and cultural rules in a generational spaceship
Luca Cinacchio University of Torino, Physics Department

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Cinacchio Mathematica UGM 2011.nb

Abstract

A generational spaceship is a hypothetical starship that travels at a speed much slower than that of light, taking for its travel hundreds or tons of years. The original occupants will leave their descendants to continue traveling. This scenario will imply dealing with biological, social and moral problems related with the society inside the ships, and the kinship rules regulating how the crew can mate, and thus whether the society can grow, stay stable or die. This discovery process is the goal of this project.

Cinacchio Mathematica UGM 2011.nb

Generations after generations, will ever the Humankind reach the stars?

We don't know yet if we will be able in the future to build spaceships that can travel so far to reach other stars and planets outside the solar system. According to Einstein theory of Relativity we know that this will take hundreds of years. But we can already discover if it will be possible to set up a crew and some kinship rules that allow the original crew to reproduce generations after generations, and eventually allow the Humankind to reach its final destination.

Cinacchio Mathematica UGM 2011.nb

A generational spaceship as metaphor of a perfectly closed society

In every society there are kinship rules, dictating who can marry who (e.g., in some societies you cannot marry your siblings), and different societies allow different mating. Using the metaphor of a generational spaceship, in this project I will explore how a closed society can evolve or die following different kinship rules, and with differents rates of generated offspring for each new generation. For any given rule a labeled genealogical tree, ultimately composed of a sequence of individuals, will be produced: it will be used to supervise the application of the kinship rule and to illustrate how in that society humans mate and produce offspring. A particular attention will be payed to the kinship rule used at the present moment in many of the societies of the humankind, that allow mating only between people connected by 4 or more kinship degrees. Applying the selected rules I will try to discover whit what distribution of probability for the generation of offspring at each new generation the society inside the spaceship can stay stable and healty, grow exponentially extinguishing the resources or be leaded to extinction. Different numbers of people in the original crew will be considered, to discover what is the minimum size of tree which can propogate and what size is guaranteed to die out.

Cinacchio Mathematica UGM 2011.nb

What is a kinship rule?

Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin.
0, 1

Expressing a degree of kinship with a number: the Civil Degree

1, 1

1, 2

Degrees are simply calculated by adding the number of links from one of the relatives. i.e. : two cousines: {2,1} and {2,2}

2, 1

2, 2

3, 1

3, 2

Cinacchio Mathematica UGM 2011.nb

What is a kinship rule? (cont.)

Kinship is a relationship between any entities that share a genealogical origin. Societies in different parts of the world and using different languages may share the same basic terminology patterns, but quiet often they don't do, and it is useful to express the kinship relation using an absolute degree. In this paper I will use the Civil Degree System, originally devised by the Romans and used as a formal basis for legal regulations on such matters as incest prohibitions, and still used in many contemporary Western legal and social systems. In the civil system, kinship degrees are simply calculated by adding the number of links from one of the relatives in question, Ego, to the common ancestor, and those that connect the ancestor to the other relative, Alter. E . g. : in the graph at the left t side individual labeled as {2,1} and {2,2} are first cousins. From {2,1} to the common ancestor (grandmather or grandfather) {0,1} there are 2 edges, and 2 esges from the last one to {2,2}, so the 2 cousins have a degree kinship equal 4.

Cinacchio Mathematica UGM 2011.nb

How the model works? The model at work

The model is based on an iterated procedure, starting from the initial condition representing the original crew. The parameters provided are: - the number N of couples in the original crew - the K degree used by the kinship rule - the probability distribution of the number C of chidren had by each couple For each combination of parame ters many running are generated, to reduce the noise of statistical random fluctuation.

Model[N_, K_, C_] := ... model code

Cinacchio Mathematica UGM 2011.nb

Adopted constrains

- All marry if they can - All stay married - Monogamy is the only form of couple relationship allowed - All have 2 or 3 kids according to a probability distribution parameter - All live to adulthood - No death for accident or similar, but only at the reaching of natural length of life - Starting with an initial population (the original crew) at level 1, and numbering in progressive order the following generations, at the given time g the live population is composed of g-1, g, g+1.

Cinacchio Mathematica UGM 2011.nb

Love is a many splendor thing

An important assumption made by the model is that no policy - exept the kinship rule - is adopted in orienting the mating of individuals. The random choiche of the partner emulate in a certain way what happens at the present time in our daily life, where love is considered an inalienable right of the individuals. Of course, the lack of any kind of policy implies that it is impossible to orient the mating of individuals, with the goal to "optimize" the grow of the society, exposing it to more dangerous statistical fluctuations.

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MAIN RESULTS

For each parameter combination I runned many simulations. To avoid too expensive computational time, I used for the original crew five, ten and twenty couples. In the graphic we see an example of genealogic three with only 4 couple, used to show a very simple case of evolution.

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Five couples
Five couples are a really small number to start a society. And in fact running the model I discovered that in mostly of the cases the society dies after a few generations. With K = 4, and 2.05 children for each couple, generated with a probability distribution function, in no case the society survived longer than 6 or 8 generations, and in the majority of the case it die after 4 generations. The same behaviour is observed increasing the number of children to 2.1, With K = 4 but increasing the number of children to 2.2, we start to see some occurencies of surviving, in the 2% of the simulations. In the 98% of the case the society die, again after just a few generations. In the following graphics we have an example of both cases. 5 couples, k = 4, 2.2 children, surviving
40 30 20 10

Same conditions, death after 6 generations

14 12 10 8 6 4 2

10

12

14

For the case where the society is surviving it is worthwile to look at the plot of the percentage of the unmarried people during the evolution, that never grow bigger then 20%. With K = 4, and 2.5 children for each couple,in 94% the society die, but in 2% stay stable, in 2% grows slowly and 2% shows an exponentila growth. In the graphics are showed an example of growth and stabilty, with at the side the barchart of unmarried people, with never go up 30%.
14 12 10 8 6 4 2 2 4 6 8 10 12 2 4 6 8 10 12

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Ten couples
With K = 4, and 2.01 children for each couple, we see again the society going to extintion, but with a litter longer life 6-10 generations. With K = 4, and 2.1 children for each couple, we start to see in the 4% of the cases of the cases stability or linear growth. With K = 4, and 2.2 children for each couple, only in the 60% of the simulations the society die, and we can observe linear or exponential growth or stability.
80 60 40 20 6 8 10 12 14 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 20 15 10 5

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Twenty couples
The same pattern observed with ten couples is repeating, and with K = 2.01 there are no chance for the society to survive, but with K = 2.1 stabilty or gowth occurs in the 30% of the simulations. In the graphics we see an example of stable evolution, with the population along the time, the % of unmarried people and a the genealogic three of this society generated with a graph network
of unmarried people in the evolution

0.15

0.10

0.05

10

12

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Conclusions

To stay stable or growth, with a kinship rule of 4, it emerges clearly a threshold for the probabilty distribution of the kids generated by each couple with value around 2.1. Bigger the initial population and bigger are the chanches to avoid extintion even at this critical value; a bigger population, even in the case of exitintion, requires longer time to die then a smaller population. This suggests that if in the future the humankind will decide to start the journey of exploring the stars using a transgenerational ship, the size of the original crew will be not a so critical factor.

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Further developments

Due to the lack of time I explored only the most plausible scenarios, with a small original crew and a kisnhip rule of k = 4, like in many of the western societies. This represents only a starting point: further developement of the research will include a bigger initial populations, and higther degree of K, and more sophisticated kinship rules as we can observe in different kind of societies, according with the NKS approach, where the objective is to explore as much as possible the space of the model's paramaters, analyzing hypothesis that may have never been formerly considered.